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RCA PVR Will Use Free Guide+ Program Guide
Mark Leighton Fisher writes "RCA has announced (among other CES goodies) a PVR/DVD player for this year that uses the free GUIDE Plus+ program guide rather than requiring an oncoming program guide contract. Once we bring the price down (yes, I work there) I may break down and get one, as I don't like the program guide fee required on current PVRs. (This may be the first no-program guide-fee commercial PVR.)"
I have a Panasonic Showstopper, which is an OEM Replay, and there has never been, and never will be, a program guide fee.
If you use the TiVo to record your favorite show on channel X and it moves to a new time or there is a new showing this week or it's an extra long episode this week you change NOTHING on the TiVo. It's all automatic. With the Guide Plus you will have to manage and monitor these changes yourself. I pay a bit each month to have someone else worry about this. I can't believe that people complain about paying less than the price of going out to eat for a guide and features that save you so much hassle and time.
The RCA PVR is $599 according to the article, and you can already get a TiVo or a Replay box with a lifetime-of-the-unit pre-paid program guide subscription for that kind of money. The RCA box only provides 40 hours of recording time, which isn't all that great either. You can get a 60 hour TiVo with lifetime guide subscription for $550.
The new feature is that the RCA box is also a DVD recorder, which may justify the extra cost for some buyers. But making a 40 hr PVR for $600 up front with no per-month free is nothing new.
(I was the third employee of Replay, which was originally Pacific Digital Media and has since been acquired by Sonic Blue.)
RCA pretty much doesn't make their own stuff anymore... they just repackage generic stuff from OEMs in places like China and Korea. It's nothing more than just a marketing brand.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Their problem is that they spend a lot of money to consolidate the tv schedules - and they offer it free on their site using the advertising model. When people scrape it for their own use, they're subverting the ads, and zap2it loses money instead of making it (bandwidth, servers, staff, syndication). It's a much larger problem because of the way XMLTV scrapes - hundreds, if not thousands of pages must be retrieved and parsed to get the complete schedule.
Now before you all scream anti-corporate statements, realize that if enough people "steal" their content, they'll simply shut it down, as no company (and no one) wants to lose money.
For an interesting previous thread on this very topic, check here.
I have an RCA television with "Guide Plus". I don't have cable,so the TV apparently downloads listings from local broadcasters at night, for a few days at a time. There are small ads on the left sides of the listings, and many times there will be gaps in the listings. The whole system is a little clunky; it takes a while to actually bring up the menu, a while to scroll ahead, and sometimes it'll "crash", causing the TV to suddenly turn off, and all the listings to be lost. The whole thing reminds a little of using Gnome a couple years ago.
This television was only bought a couple months ago, but hopefully RCA will improve the software before they bring this PVR to market. It's not such a big deal that the software's buggy in my case, because the TV itself is fine; I just don't use the Guide Plus function much. With a PVR, it'd be a much bigger problem, I think.
Korea is too expensive. Taiwan, maybe...China for sure. They don't even make microwaves in Korea any longer...that has all just been moved to China. Korea's labor and infrastructure costs are simply too high. My company is keeping R & D and marketing here, but everything else has gone or will go overseas.
> TiVo charges $150 for a 60 hour unit right now (see http://www.tivo.com)
That's for a refurbished model without a DVD player. A new 60 hour model is $299. Add the life-time subscription and you have $549. Add $100 for a DVD player and you have $649. And that's without tight DVD/PVR integration. At least compare apples to apples, and don't tell me you already have a DVD player either.
Nope. A guy who goes by the name Tridge (TiVoNet, ExtractStream fame) has come up with a way to feed the TiVo program guide data in a form it likes. Hasn't released it out of respect for TiVo, but if they go under there is a plan B.
-- Terry
that had been the case , but was the patent had recently been successfully challenged. I forget who the litigants were , but the outcome is that there are competing EPG's emerging.
Gemstar doesn't actually do , or develop , much - they just sue other companies.
There are Canadian digital satellite services - StarChoice and Bell ExpressVu. They're similar to, say, DirectTV, although with fewer channels. Bell ExpressVu offers a Tivo-like PVR as an option.
Traditional satellite dishes (the big ones that let you get network feeds and whatnot) are illegal.
For a while, there was a grey area about getting US DirectTV dishes and pirate decoder cards, but I'm pretty sure that's been cleared up and it's clearly illegal now. Of course, lots of people still have them (and Tivo boxes to go with them).
But there currently is no way for Canadians to get a Tivo-like set-top box for normal, legal TV - although the software with TV cards like the Ati All-in-Wonder works (since it's based on Guide+).
The discussion on this thread seems to have already nailed what's going on - RCA has cut a deal with Gemstar for data access equivalent to the Tivo or Replay "lifetime" subscriptions.
:-) It also does some interesting non-GuidePlus+ like capturing the close caption info into a window or file on the fly, etc. Geek stuff, you know.
I have a couple of ATI All-In-Wonder cards of various vintage and they've always included a PC-client version of Guide Plus with no monthly fee as well. Works very nicely - you do a once-a-week download of program info, tailored to your local service. There's an app that lets you scroll through this info, similar to what you see at tvguide.com, but better actually since it's local data - you can very quickly scroll through times and days in the 1 week range.
The All-In-Wonder includes PVR functionality, although I must admit that even with generic installation, it seems to work quite poorly for me. The GuidePlus+ app works very nicely - if you want to tell the PVR to record something, you just select it in the TV grid and you're happening.
There are also include a number of other interesting functions that fall out of doing this on a computer. The TV view overlays the program title as you scroll through the channels - nice to be able to tell which Tremors movie you're seeing when you flip to the Tremors Channel - oops, Sci-Fi Channel.
ATI even includes this free GuidePlus+ functionality in their standalone TV Wonder tuner cards. These cards only run $50, so it's clearly a steal.
I do a lot of videotaping and have a couple of Sony VCRs that include GuidePlus+ and it's a really good thing - a huge leap in friendliness over VCRPlus+. Had I realized that this feature would disappear from all VCRs (along with all quality VCRs going away!), I would have bought more of them. On these VCRs (Sony SLV-M20HF), the GuidePlus info is also provided for free and is delivered to the VCR when it's turned off in the blanking interval of some channel.
Guide+ started life as "VideoGuide", an interesting little piece of geekiness that was a small box with an antenna that picked up the guide data (as well as news and sports scores) from the pager network. It had a very simple remote - a little 4-way joystick and one button. It hooked up inline with your cable/antenna input.
It worked OK, albeit slowly, but was ahead of its time.
Then Gemstar bought the company. They already had a competing product, called Starsight. Starsight happened to come built-in to various TVs and VCRs (as well as a standalone unit), and picked up their data from the local PBS VBI feeds, but the "presentation" was poorer. Since VideoGuide was only a standalone unit, they chose to kill that, but they at least offered 100% refunds on the hardware.
I had VideoGuide, and still have Starsight (but not for much longer as I wait for my DirecTV install).
Then Gemstar had the original VideoGuide company rework the product to be integrated into TVs and VCRs, and called it "Guide+", then "TV Guide+" (they had bought TV Guide then), and back to Guide+. Several vendors were on board, but RCA/Proscan was the only vendor I ever saw to actually bring it to market.
Incidentally, there hasn't been a new Starsight product on the market in years. I'm actually surprised I still get service.
rm
Sci-Fi Storm
DirecTV lowered my monthly bill TWICE in 2002. What more can I ask for?
tv that stays on when it rains?
seriously - i had directv for two years, the dish was mounted on a 6x6 pine post sunk 4ft onto concrete (barn beam), with all the mounting bolts tightened till the metal was distorted, and the reciever would still lose the satellite lock if the winds were gusting more than 30kts. i live on the ocean, so that's a bigger problem than it sounds. dense cloud cover, that made for some interesting jaggies...and fugeddaboutit in the rain. this with a signal booster on ~75ft of cable no less! i'm happy with digital cable - i get almost as many channels as dTV, really everything except the sports package, the same image and sound quality, and my tv stays on 24x7! even in the rain!
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley